Two items came across my desktop last week that drew me to reflect on both the eruptive time of the event and what we might call a more glacial pace. That these were both released months ago reminded me that the pace of academia—or at least my own pace within it—is ill suited to the time of internet media. If blogs and Twitter are meant to announce events and happenings in ‘real time,’ I am running behind. But if the Center for PostNatural History and the Oxford Literary Review are any indication, I am also not alone. It has been nearly a decade since Crutzen and Steffen pronounced the Epoch of the Anthropocene. But only recently a community of scholars and artists—including those of us who maintain this blog—has begun to process the consequences of understanding humanity as a geologic force and the earth as a more-than-nonhuman entity produced with and through social, political, and economic forces.
Among them is the Center for PostNatural History, which opened in Pittsburgh in March of this year. The Center reflects the advent of the Anthropocene and a more-than-nonhuman earth. The Center adopts the archival logic of the natural history museum. But rather than accumulating ‘natural’ artifacts, its collection is dedicated to acquiring and interpreting the ‘organisms of postnatural origin,’ such as those modified by selective breeding or genetic engineering (www.postnatural.org). Now showing amid the Center’s permanent collection in Pittsburgh is an exhibit on ‘Atomic Age Rodents.’ The Center also has an exhibition on display at the Berlin Museum fur Naturkunde through August.
Like the concept of the Anthropocene, the notion of a ‘PostNatural’ history risks legitimating ‘natural’ histories and their attendant pasts, often awash in the more neutral or beneficent hue of pre-human purity. But if the announcement of a ‘PostNatural’ era reinvigorates the fabled fall of human—and now nonhuman—life from a more innocent perch, it also trains public attention on the complex and irrevocably knotted ‘interplay between culture [and] nature.’ This alone makes it a most welcome addition within the world of art and artifacts.
A second item of interest reflects the increasing attention of humanities scholars to ecological issues. Back in December of 2012, the Oxford Literary Review published a special issue on deconstruction and the Anthropocene. Neither am I a regular reader of the OLR nor does Jacques Derrida naturally spring to mind as a theorist of environmental change, so the special issue peaked my interest. Derrida’s emphasis on ephemera in the form of hauntings, traces, and erasures seems—at least on superficial reading—to be insufficient for confronting the material weight of anthropogenic climate change. But the pieces that make up the issue argue a solid case for considering Derrida’s work more carefully in this emergent era. Edited by Timothy Clark, the entire forum is worth reading, but highlights include essays by Claire Colebrook, Timothy Morton, and Nigel Clark.
Colebrook’s essay does the most thorough job debunking misreadings of Derrida as a thinker incompatible with the matter of geologic and biospheric transformations. Colebrook argues that ‘deconstruction articulated the motifs that ought to [most] concern us now.’ These include the annihilation of humanity and the question of ‘whether the future should be thought of in terms of sustaining the present’ (201). For Colebrook, deconstruction reveals that the very systems that have enabled a destructive distance from our ‘habitat’ are the same as those that enable humans to distance themselves from their own destruction. Accordingly, it helps to bare both our complicity in the constitution of geologic and climatologic catastrophe as well as our domestication of apocalyptic futures. Like the earlier threat of nuclear apocalypse, the Anthropocene recreates humans as a being that subsists through a violent symbiosis with the earth itself. For Colebrook, this new era accordingly announces an inhuman humanity, whose are actions haunted by the logic of its own extinction. Colebrook argues that in such an era, returning to deconstruction as well as Heidegger’s figuring of ‘destruction’ might provide traction for thinking with/as human life as the violent producer of its own inhospitable conditions.
Morton also evaluates the power of Derrida’s thought in the context of the Anthropocene. He works at Derrida’s claim that ‘there is nothing outside the text.’ But rather than attending to the ‘text,’ Morton focuses that ‘nothing’ that seems to haunt it from the outside. For Morton, the Anthropocene indicates a world in which there is no ‘outside-human text.’ Here and now, the nonhuman is enfolded within the human, threatening it from the inside. That the dangers of the Anthropocene are located within the contours of this human/nonhuman Klein bottle itself is uncanny. Anthropogenic climate change, radioactive materials, etc. have become ‘massively distributed’ ‘hyperobjects’ that exceed our control and act at a timescale beyond our comprehension (232). From within it, human life and present moments become lost for Morton. And, as the present recedes, a gulf between the past and future widens, a gulf that Morton argues is that ‘nothing’ that is outside the text (235). Accordingly, presence and reality—‘at the uncanny intersection of geotrauma and human history’—take on an unreal quality (236). We are left “without world and without Nature” where “nonhumans crowd into human space, leering like faces in a James Ensor painting or the faces of Butoh dancers” (236).
For Clark, the earth too is sinister. But, in its dangers, Clark formulates a method for knowledge production and (presumably) action with which we may begin to understand life within the Anthropocene. Like Colebrook, Clark draws out the question of the political in the face of something as monstrous as geologic change. Deconstruction and the logic of the trace, for Clark, encourage attention to the ‘strangeness harbored within the familiar’ and enable us to ask questions such as: ‘what kind of planet is this that births a creature capable of [undermining the conditions of its own existence]’ (261). This uncanny relationship, Clark insists, is emergent out of an earth that does not cohere to itself, at whose ‘crustal rifts and sutures’ appear violent contradictions and collisions. Like the fire that gave birth both to it and to human civilization, our planet is capable of ‘turning against’ and consuming itself. Such knowledge allows no room for an imaginary of—or politics driven by—the concept of sustainability. In its place, Clark suggests that constituting a future requires first reckoning with the ‘fearsome inheritance’ of an unstable and violent planet (274). Clark therefore calls for a ‘speculative geophysics’ driven by philosophical and cultural interest in the earth’s processes as well as a more ‘beyond the empirical’ engagement with bio- and geo-physics on the part of the natural sciences.
Other essays in the volume include Louise Squire’s thoughtful look at death in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Bronislaw Szerszynski’s essay on what happens to ‘anthropos’ when human meets geology, Sam Solnick’s paper on the ethics of climate science and geoengineering, and Alex Trexler’s look at Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s ‘epistemic things’ in light of the Anthropocene. Together, these papers breath much needed life into the intersection of Derridian and ecological thought. And they further provide a necessary reminder that Derrida’s work—even at its most erudite—offers important interventions in contemporary material and political thought, at a time in which our sense of time itself appears to be changing.
